[LegitShady]

> I tend to believe Palmer Luckey has the ability to achieve daring innovations.

If you're talking about oculus, they 'stole' a lot of their development from valve because there were valve employees who convinced whoever was decision making there to just give oculus tech without any license prior to the facebook acquisition, and then those employees got hired by oculus once they had facebook money.

Oculus is the story of one of the biggest tech scams in VR and the scam was on valve by employees who took advantage of and betrayed valve.

[notabanker]

It's for insights like these that I come to HN. Thanks for disabusing me of the notion that Oculus was a classic garage to greatness story.

[LegitShady]

alan yates (posting as vk2zay on reddit) said the launch rift architecture was identical to the valve room headset architecture with its own tracking implementation and its own fresnel lens system.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/4klu94/oculus_becomin...

>While that is generally true in this case every core feature of both the Rift and Vive HMDs are directly derived from Valve's research program. Oculus has their own CV-based tracking implementation and frensel lens design but the CV1 is otherwise a direct copy of the architecture of the 1080p Steam Sight prototype Valve lent Oculus when we installed a copy of the "Valve Room" at their headquarters. I would call Oculus the first SteamVR licensee, but history will likely record a somewhat different term for it...

---

Ben Krasnow (former valve employee who now has the youtube channel "Applied Science" https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/ which you should check out if you haven't yet) posted here on hackernews back in 2017 during the oculus lawsuit.

> It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

and then further down that thread

> Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414190

Oculus was built on stolen tech taken by employees working at valve who convinced valve to give the tech away in the spirit of cooperation, and then jumped ship to facebook right away for the $$$.

I won't give them a cent.

Every time people post things to do with John Carmack all I can think about is that he was doing the same thing from his former employer to oculus as well. No matter what he did back in the day to make video game engines amazing, his involvement in oculus is a stain on his reputation. Even if you thought he was innocent in a vacuum, along with the rest of the shenanigans with oculus I don't think it was so innocent. He took the source code he wrote, sent it to himself, then he was involved in the "clean room" reimplementation? I don't believe it no matter what the courts ruled could be proven.

They are literally a company founded on "semi legal" theft, fraud, betrayal, etc.

[notabanker]

Amazing synthesis of facts... so much I didn't know.

I have a copy of The history of the future and was planning to read it. If all it's going to be is PR for Luckey, I will donate it to a used books shop.

Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform? Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?

[LegitShady]

I've never read this book but I think if you read it, you should take it with a grain of salt. There's a lot of self aggrandizing and making your own myths in tech these days since personal brand is important at their level. What you do with your book is up to you though - if I had it I'd read it just to be aware of what's being said. If you keep it or not is your choice.

>Would you have an opinion on VR being the next computing platform?

Not any time soon, but maybe once the display technology improves. I like VR and don't get VR sickness, but when I take off the headset after a long session I can tell I haven't been focusing my eyes on distant things for a long time and the whole world feels a little unreal. I think the more time you spend in VR the more likely you are to cause short sightedness, but I don't have any scientific evidence of that so its just my opinion.

>Despite the troubled past, do you suppose Oculus Quest 2 could become THE standard?

I have many friends who own the Q2. It's an affordable device with a lot of good ideas. But sadly I think oculus was run by toxic people and being acquired by facebook can't have improved it. Them requiring a facebook login and their privacy policy preclude me from participating.

It's a neat device but I wouldn't call it the standard. The index is the gold standard. The quest 2 is the subway or taco bell restaurant of VR headsets - ubiquitous, affordable, but not better than the competition although the competition costs more.

We'll what happens in the future but I'm not betting on VR/AR computing being common anytime soon. If it is I hope facebook isn't the primary supplier because oculus and facebook are both unethical companies I dont' want to deal with.

But what do I know? I'm just a guy who loved the idea of it and paid attention during the development of the recent VR revival. I think the biggest barrier is resolution, and then graphics silicon need to run it at good framerates.